In today’s post, I’m sharing a picture of my very first fabric covered book.

My First Fabric Covered Book

Back in early May a good friend Crafty Nanna took pity on my lack of sewing skills and came round to get me started with sewing. She also very kindly left me a huge pile of fabric to play with. The fabric I covered the book with has a lovely suede finish. Very tactile, and would make great books for men. I covered the book board with a light layered of PVA and applied the fabric. The turn in’s on the corners were tricky, as if I applied too much glue it seeped through and marked the surface.

Here is the book, once it has been decorated

Fabric Covered book, embellished with ATC

I created an ATC using Tim Holtz Distress Inks and Versa Fine in Onyx Black

Earlier this year I bought Tim Holtz book, Compendium of Curiosities. The other day I decided to have a go at some of the techniques he showed in there.

Here are my results with Weathered Wood Grunge, although I did the technique using textured card, rather than Grungeboard but it still works.

Weathered Wood Panel

Weathered Wood Panel

This is a little pamphlet stitched book that I created with one of those panels.

Weathered Wood Grunge style book

As you can see, I used the sanding technique on the cover of the book, to add some more distressing. This is a great fun technique to do. Check out Tim Holtz book for instructions for how to create Weathered Wood Grunge.

Given the embossing involved, this also counts as one of my pieces for this month’s Virtual Crafting Challenge.

Today I’d like to share a picture of the Star Book that I created, it features Clarity Stamps. This month’s theme for The Virtual Crafting Challenge is B. So I thought I’d make a Book 🙂

Star Book Featuring Clarity Stamps

Barbara Grey demonstrated a design similar to this, on Create and Craft in January 2010. I cut my paper to a smaller size than she mentioned, so instead of using the same stamp on the inside, I used a smaller version of the ornate corner. My book also features different corner stamps to the one’s used in the original demo.

Products Used

Stamps: Clarity Ornate Corner small and large

Paper: Pearl from Paper Mill shop

Ink: Brilliance; Coffee Bean

Mat board covers and Perfect Pearl powders

Thanks to Barbara for the inspiration, your stamps are wonderful and so versatile too.

Today I’d like to share some pictures of the Slip Case I made for signatures waiting to be bound into books. Because of limited dexterity, my bookbinding tends to be broken into steps, with varying amounts of time between the steps. It may be several days/weeks between my cutting and folding paper, before they are piereced and sewn.

Here is the case I created

My first Case

Here is a view of the lining of the case

My favorite size to bind in is A7, so my case is a little taller than this. I now have a place where folded papers can live until they are needed for a book. I always mark the corners of my signatures, after they are pierced, to ensure they remain in the correct orientation for sewing. So my pierced signatures can also happily live in the case until their turn comes round.

Sewn signatures, awaiting covering. Safe in their new case.

The method I used to create this case was featured on Sage Reynold’s channel on You Tube, I’ve put a link to his channel and the slip case films below. Sage has a wonderful method of working and explains the process from start to finish. The best thing about Sage’s method of working is that he is taking all his measurements directly from the item he is casing, and uses very clever templates for repeated cuts. SOOO much easier and saves a lot of time. The finished box is really sturdy too.

This is my first slip case, and I am very pleased with the result. Thank you Sage for your excellent tuition on You Tube, it is inspiring and your video’s are so helpful and easy to follow.

For those with long memories, you may remember I have made a case bound book a long time ago. This is my first voyage into real book cloth though and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Case bound book, my first try with book cloth.

The covers are made from off cuts of mount board, the book is A7 in size and has 80 gsm text weight paper. I followed Sage Reynolds instructions for constructing the case and this is my first successful spine gap. I have always struggled to allow sufficient space for the spine. I struggled to hold everything in the right place to measure as Sage showed in his video, but it was well worth the effort.

This book was a triumph of ‘What if…’ I didn’t have mull to line the spine so I used thin cotton bandage 🙂 turned out ok, I learnt to use a thicker end paper or apply less glue. This was my first book that was sewn onto tapes, or in my case organza ribbon 🙂 I even had a go at a wrapped endband. I used the method shown in Peter Baumgartner’s video and wrapped book cloth around a cotton cord. This taught me I needed to cut my finished head band closer to the book than I did, but for a first attempt it was worthy 🙂

Here is the book with some embellishment added 🙂

These A7 sized books are perfect for practicing techniques, they are fast to sew, use minimal resources and you learn a lot in the process. They also will make perfect gifts at Christmas, they are small enough to pop in you pocket, so really useful.

Links

There are a couple of excellent channels on You Tube for book binding that I highly recommend for anyone trying this kind of binding for the first time.

Sage Reynold’s. Sage’s videos are awesome! He has such an efficient workflow and his passion for the subject shows in the care he takes with his projects. I’m linking to the main channel, but the video’s I used for this bind were the ‘Making a Case’ one’s. There are also video’s on how to sew signatures.

Peter Baumgartner. Peter’s videos show the entire process from start to finish including the sewing, I used the method for the sewing but didn’t have spine cloth so finished my book using Sage’s method.

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Have fun
Billie :)

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